Tag Archives: jobs

Cheap gas is great. I’m all for it. Seriously $1.90 at the local pump. Fantastic. But pretty much all net “real” jobs created in the US since the onset of the current economic calamity have been as a result of the shale gas revolution and in Texas specifically. The oil plunge has impacted this and Americans should be prepared for it.

It is interesting that according to the attached article Texas alone is the 6th largest producer of crude oil on the planet now. One never hears that in the old media.

Bob Dylan is a personal favorite of mine and to be clear he’s not making some anarcho-capitalist statement here. He isn’t openly advocating a libertarian economic stance. It’s just common sense coming from an old man who has seen a whole lot of life, made a whole lot of money, and who has made his way observing the human condition.

Seems a reasonable position for the guy who once had a radical Marxist terrorist group name themselves after one of his lyrics and who once sang an ode to Woody Guthrie.

We are starting to approach what many economists call “full employment.” The point at which the people who are unemployed really are “just between jobs.” There is little long term unemployment. Jobs are plentiful. There is upward pressure on wages. In short, general prosperity.

By Ed Ring, executive director, California Policy Center

Conservatives in America are at a crossroads. They face a choice between greater freedom or greater security. While striking this delicate balance has required ongoing policy choices throughout history, recent events involving law enforcement have brought these choices into sharp focus. Here’s how Patrik Johnson, writing last month in the Christian Science Monitor, described the choice:

“Police forces nationwide are being pulled between two opposite trends: more empathetic, community policing and an increasingly militarized response to crises.”

That’s a crony system for you. The banks (and the bankers) with access to the Federal Reserve, which are now officially “too big to fail” and so enjoy an explicit license for moral hazard have only gotten richer. We the people “recapitalized” the banks. We indemnified them. We made them whole even though most of the big banks had leveraged themselves out to stupid levels and so deserved to go down. But the banks had the connections and so they now sit fat and happy.

Same for the car companies and lots of other big vested interests. They had connections in the Obama White House and in other parts of Washington so they were saved.

Meanwhile as the hapless titans were being rescued millions of Americans lost their houses and their jobs. 6 years later, for many, they haven’t come back.

Small business is only the heart and soul of this country. No big deal. It’s not like it’s hard to make a small business work even without entangling government red tape and expensive mandates from DC made by bureaucrats who don’t even know what a payroll is. It’s pretty easy.

There is no reason why government workers, whose salaries are paid via the taxation of the citizenry, should on average make more than their private sector brethren. Government workers typically have jobs for life. That bubble of consistency is how government workers are supposed to be compensated. The rest of us can get fired at any time, but we get paid a little more for this uncertainty. At least that’s how it used to work.